Number of the Month

May 2007

Pompous paradigm pushing

Probably most of us have a word that makes us reach for our
metaphorical revolvers. For Göring (allegedly)
it was “culture”. For your bending author it is “paradigm” which is
nearly always a forewarning that someone is attempting to pull the wool over
your eyes. So when someone uses it eight
times in a short article, the old trigger finger gets a bit too itchy to bear.
When that someone is a
politician writing in The Times
the itch becomes a tic. For those who only understand English here is a brief
translation:

Look at me and how clever I
am. I know all these long words and some are not even in the dictionary. I also
read books by people with difficult foreign-sounding names, such as Kuhn. We all
now agree that Marxism is dead and we all believe in free markets. We New
Conservatives, however, have come up with two new and original ideas. The first
is that the way people live their lives is more important than systems of
economic management. The second is that direct control by central government is
not necessarily the best way to improve people’s lives. Only Dave knows this.

08/05/07

One man’s legacy

Stand
not on the order of your going, but go at once.
Lady Macbeth

It
is nothing less than quite amazing that one man has wrought so many changes in a
mere decade. It is also extraordinary how important numbers have become, nearly
all of them wrong, but in the media the main product of the Blair translation to
a higher plane is millions of words. There have been pages of articles, special
supplements and endless correspondence. Some writers even claim that he made no
difference. On the contrary, he has made a bigger change to his nation than any
other leader who employed non-violent means. Ourselves ten years ago would not
recognise the British society of today.

Blair suffered from the Genesis Delusion. He thought
he merely had to say “Let there be X” and there would be X. He never quite
cottoned on to the truth of Bismarck’s dictum that “Politics is the art of
the possible.” It is the inevitable outcome of electing a leader who has never
run anything, but no doubt the British will do it again. In turn this is the
inevitable outcome of the youth and celebrity culture.

The Disunited Kingdom

Hushing up the abandonment of sovereignty now provides a
major part of government activity. All but the most trivial of Government
actions originate in committee rooms in Brussels; yet ministers strenuously
defend indefensible policies as if they were their own. For example, water
providers are harangued for neglecting infrastructure, while they are required
to comply with absurd
and expensive EU directives. Unelected regional councils exert shadowy
control, while unelected officials enforce
the shackling of democratic local government.

One of the characteristics of this regime has been its
utter contempt for the Parliamentary process. Sofa
government leaves no audit trail and produces uninformed decisions. Serious
politicians agonised about the
West Lothian question; Blair just ignored it and consequently left a running
sore in the body politic, encouraging Scots separatists to further extremes
while building up resentment among the English.

He might have got away with it if he had demonstrated any
degree of competence. Weak negotiating skills have been the hallmark of
Government activity, with everyone from the EU diktatorialists to
our own medical unions taking us for a ride. The Blair ritual of negotiation
has become the national one. It requires a great show of initial bravado with
declarations of how you are not going to give way, followed bya coda demonstrating why giving way was only rational and what you really
wanted to do all the time. The classical example was over Britain’s increased
contribution to the EU spending spree. One of Blair’s greatest failures,
however, is in not standing up to the man next door. Brown has scuppered many
genuine attempts at reform, while continually extending his Treasury empire.

Fraud has become endemic. Ten years ago, for example,
electoral fraud was unknown in Britain. Widespread
voting fraud is now acknowledged, all just to gerrymander a few more votes
for the governing party.

The relentless appetite

The most defining characteristic of the regime is its
insatiable hunger for numbers. There is no aspect of the culture that has not
been sacrificed to it. The statistics industry is the most prolific of modern
times. A significant proportion of the working population is engaged in fiddling
the figures, in healthcare, education and policing, just to name the most
obvious cases. The very existence of targets and league tables ensures that the
numbers that go into them bear no resemblance to reality. Numerical falsehood
has never been more profitable.

This is also the new age of The Snoopers. The post war
Labour Government was thrown out largely because of Winston Churchill’s
successful campaign against The Snoopers, but those were the days when we had
real opposition. The Snoopers are just one example of a whole new swathe of wage
parasites who are sucking the life out of a wilting economy, while a diminishing
band of wealth creators struggle to keep it going.

The surveillance society

It has become a cliché that Orwell wrote a warning but
Blair read it as an instruction manual. Pro rata for population Britain has more
surveillance cameras than any other country in the world. Miniature hidden
cameras are now
in place to detect “envirocrime” – yet another Orwellism. A new
parasitic army of anti-smoking snoopers will be armed with digital cameras.
There are now over
250 justifications for officials to intrude forcefully on an Englishman’s
home, which was so recently his castle.

Education, education, education

What were once supposed to be the happiest days of our
lives have now become a nightmare for teachers and children alike – all tests
and preparation-for-tests to feed the relentless appetite. The state is now
building giant child-processing units without
even a playground to relieve the monotony. Functional illiteracy and
innumeracy are rife among those emerging from this nightmare. Increasing numbers
are opting out to form gangs of feral youth that further blight the British
experience. Academic standards in school and university exams have reached a
farcical low. Apart from the cultural damage, it is slow economic suicide.

The fear of old age

The inhumanity with which New Labour treats the young is
only exceeded by its savagery towards the old. Elderly people live in a state of
permanent anxiety. They experience a rate of increase of cost of living that
greatly exceeds the fraudulent index used by the Government so, however they
start out, they experience a steady annual decline in their standard of living.
The five-billion-a-year pensions raid was one of the most truly wicked acts of
any government in history. People who made sacrifices to ease their life’s end
have had their savings simply stolen. They look with envy at those who
fecklessly spent all their income having a good time. It is a dreadful cliché
to apply the epithet “obscene” to a sum of money, but what other term is
adequate for the Prime
Minister’s pension fund? There has been nothing like it since the days of
the robber barons of the Rhine. Less fortunate pensioners dread that final
illness, which the Government will exploit to take away their savings and then
their homes. They face ending their lives in ghastly “care” homes, where if
they are lucky they will only be neglected and not bullied or starved. Their
spouses are left stranded and unwanted. The poorest of all are trapped in the
serpentine coils of the Means Test.

The fear of being ill

Political correctness rules. Smoking is banned on the basis
of falsified data about imaginary deaths, while filthy hospital lavatories are
tolerated, condemning thousands of real people to horrible deaths. Patients
suffer the indignity of mixed-sex wards and inedible food. A hospital bed is now
one of the
most dangerous places to be in Britain. Now one of the biggest fears is
falling ill out of hours. A ramshackle and astonishingly expensive system,
supposed to replace the traditional doctor’s visit, is fraught with delay and
failure.

The fear of crime

Only 2.5%
of police are assigned to “response duties”. The rest spend their time
filling in forms. To meet their numerical targets they pick on soft
targets and neglect serious but more difficult crimes. Criminals roam the
country stealing at will whatever they fancy. Virtually no one bothers to report
a crime any more, unless they need a crime number for insurance purposes, which
ensures that crime statistics are total nonsense. Yet they are still trotted out
by ministers.

Transport

In June 1997 Prescott, Blair’s ever
ludicrous deputy, declared: "I will have failed in five years time if
there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by
car. It's a tall order, but I urge you to hold me to it." He failed!

Public transport is now so expensive, unreliable and
uncomfortable that it is shunned by all except those who have no alternative.

Slaughter

The
foot and mouth holocaust is, unbelievably, all but forgotten. As an example
of the arrogance and obstinacy of politicians leading to mind boggling cruelty
it is unparalleled. Not only did more than 7 million hapless animals go to
unnecessary deaths in the most appalling circumstances, but thousands of rural
businesses (not only farms but the likes of hotels and even hot air balloon
manufacturers) went to the wall. The most cynical episode of all, however, was
the way it was all swept under the carpet, with the connivance of the
establishment media, for the sake of Blair’s successful campaign for
re-election.

Ridicule

For older Britons one of the most painful experiences of
modern life is to see their once proud nation held up to ridicule.

Ten years ago we used to laugh at California as the home of
politically correct absurdity.Now
the world laughs at us for the same reason. It is all exemplified by the
Australian web site Eye on Britain and
its subtitle Stories from a very strange
place.

The best you can say in Blair’s favour is that he meant
no harm. His crime was insouciance. For a politician he exhibited relatively
little malice. Now Brown is another matter entirely.

PS

The final betrayal

Sp!ked reports
that the Royal Society has changed its motto of over 400 years and replaced it
by one that manages to combine utter banality with a sinister ambiguity. The
inheritance of Newton, who stood on the shoulders of giants, has passed to
dwarfs. No! Lower than dwarfs. Maggots! A certain convocation of politic worms
have infiltrated the ailing body of science and are turning it to corruption. The
succinct Latin motto summed up the essential scepticism of real science, while
the new one is redolent of the new authoritarianism that is the complete
reverse.

The new motto is Respect
the facts. It prompts the question “Whose facts?” Hitler’s facts?
Stalin’s facts? No, May’s facts! Oddly enough, one of the first items posted
on Number Watch seven years ago was a
commentary on some of May’s facts when he was only a SIR. Will science and
humanity ever return to the glory and sanity of 1663? It seems unlikely in these
dark days.

Afterthought: It is perhaps salutary
to remember that, with the possible exception of Newton, the greatest scientific
revolutionary was a humble patents office clerk in Zurich.

And they wonder why people are cynical about politics

MPs have passed
a bill to exclude their expenses from the Freedom of Information Act. There
is certainly something special about the author of the bill, one David
MacLean.

Stuntman Dave’s New Conservatives have adopted New
Labour’s policy of keeping a good academic education as the
preserve of the rich. The decision was announced ex cathedra by David Willets (a former grammar schoolboy who sends
his children to private school) and endorsed by Dave (Eton and
Oxford
). It was done without
consulting the membership or even the party’s own much vaunted policy
groups. The convoluted
logic that Willets employs to provide justification for the decision makes
Oliver Letwin (see the opening piece above) sound like the paragon of clarity.

The latest Government con has all the hallmarks of a modern
political event. It began with yet another EU directive based on junk science,
went through a convoluted process of chaotic horse-trading and ended up as yet
another stealth tax on the groaning citizenry. HIPs
are a completely irrelevant imposition that will bear down hardest on the
increasing numbers who will be forced to sell their homes through financial
stress in the coming months. They create a whole new class of non-productive
wage parasites. They will, however, help to ensure that
Britain
plays its full part in the slow economic suicide of
Europe
.

The Government suspended its war of attrition against
small, mainly rural post offices, but
renewed it as soon as the local elections were out of the way. Why it hates
them so much is not clear. It systematically cut off many of their sources of
income (road tax, BBC tax, pension payments etc.) and then forbade them from
developing others, so it is not surprising that they are losing money. They are
among the last bits of glue holding many small communities together. This lot
are not just incompetent, they are evil.

Three cheers, then, for John Kelly and his one
man fight against corrupt authoritarianism.

Apocaholics Anonymous

You have to admire the chutzpah

After ten years of disastrous non-policy, Tony Blair has
the audacity to start
lecturing us on Energy. As we commented on the last energy white
paper (Power mad), it was already
far too late four years ago. He sums up the situation in the first paragraph,
except that is what he should have been saying ten years ago.

What about this for a paragraph?:

As if that were not enough, we are now faced with
countries such as Russia, who are prepared to use their energy resources as an
instrument of policy. Over ten years I have watched energy policy go from being
a relatively quiet backwater to something taking on a strategic importance that
could be as crucial to our country’s future as defence.

You need to pinch yourself to make sure you are not
dreaming. That is written by the man who was in charge for ten years and all he
was doing was watching. Energy policy was never
a quiet backwater – it is the life blood of a modern nation. Everything that
has happened and will happen was predicted.

Apart from a load of claptrap about carbon, to justify
economic suicide on religious grounds, he has nothing more to say. As we
observed four years ago, power cuts are now inevitable.
People are going to die. It is not the apocalypse, but it will be damned nasty.
Who will take the blame when it happens, probably not the Man
of a decade, but whoever is standing when the music stops.

23/05/07

Brilliant!

It might have been meant to be irony. If so, it was a
little too subtle for this bear of little brain. Nevertheless, in the political
sketch in the Telegraph, the adjective brilliant
was associated with the proper noun Miliband.
There is at least one
Englishman who seems to think that the capacity to carry out a simple job of
work ought to have something to do with that evaluation. Regular readers of our featured
blog might also beg to differ. A further curiosity with this particular
story is the determination with which the Telegraph leader
writer tries to maintain the fiction that Miliband is peddling his own
policy and not acting under the force of draconian fines imposed by the
unelected commissars of the EU.

What is the basis on which the media assign the attribute
of “intelligence” to certain politicians? Does it happen in other countries?
An intelligent politician ought to be able to argue a point with clarity, even
if he does not actually believe it himself. It is one of the things they used to
teach us at grammar school. On this page above are featured two Conservative (if
you will pardon the expression) politicians who singularly fail in this respect,
yet they are conventionally labelled as “highly intelligent” by the
establishment media (one of them is even nicknamed “Two-brains”). Is there,
perhaps, a resonance with post
modernist philosophy?

By the way, take note of the second reader’s comment on
that editorial:

We should be recycling at the molecular level, thus avoiding all the
more tedious cases of hand sorting.
It's called incineration.

In these days of the new religion such commonsense is now
regarded as sin.

The great wi-fi scare

Some readers have noted the silence of Number Watch on
this subject. Some scares are so stupid that they are not worth commenting on.
Nevertheless, you will still find some publicity seeking professor to lend them
credence. There is appropriate comment here.

Footnote: What a silly old cynical electronic
engineer your bending author is! This
account, pointed out by number watcher Ian Reid, is in the Independent,
so it must be right.

30/05/09

Number of the month - one

One is Penny
Cambell, whose sad death at the hands of the NHS Out of Hours Service had
such a terrible inevitability about it. Your
bending author knows only too well what she experienced during her last hours,
having contracted a life threatening condition at a weekend in January.
First (and eventually) you are connected to an official, clearly not qualified,
whose duty is obviously to persuade you to go away. If you are persistent, you
get to talk to a doctor, who is also dissuasive. Eventually, if you are still
persistent you allowed to have a visit from a doctor. He arrives, after a delay
of several hours, in a chauffeur-driven vehicle, having no drugs and no access
to your medical records. Faced with the threat of an NHS hospital your bending
author elected for self-medication with antibiotics, so all that had been
achieved was a delay of eight hours.

It is not just the inefficiency of the system that astounds
you, but the lavishness. Doctors on extra pay are chauffeur-driven over large
distances (a neighbour makes a nice bit of extra pocket money as a driver). The
GP practices were offered such a derisory sum for providing these services that
opting out was clearly indicated. Our local GPs offered to continue Saturday
surgery but were turned down by the Primary Care Trust. Who are the Primary Care
Trust? No one seems to know, but their directors seem to be non-medical
busybodies who talk in New
Labour jargon. The BMA is the pits. Not only has it abandoned science in
favour of political correctness, it has also abandoned the Hippocratic Oath.

Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said
"Of course, we had to do something about it and we did. And I'm very proud
of the fact, and I think that the BMA is as well, that we have got the best GP
service in the world." She is notoriously the least competent minister in
one of the most incompetent governments in British history.

Incompetence not only wastes billions of pounds, it kills
people. Diagnosis remains a difficult art, but embed it in a stupid system and
you get stupid, tragic results.

And a bonus one

A happier note! Just as some of us old sceptics were
reaching the depths of despair over how traditional science has been swept away
by the new eco-religion, along comes one
young lady to prove that modern youth are not all just brainwashed passive
sponges. Kristen
Byrnes is clearly one of the people of the year. Hope springs eternal in the
human breast.